My Husband and My Wives

by Charles Rowan Beye

  In the end I think Penny and I both paid with that dreadful inky black all-enveloping cloud of failure that covered us whenever we had to think of our shared past. The therapy eventually ran its course, when the doctor said to us, “I always vote for marriage and against divorce. But, I am sad to say, I don’t think this marriage can be saved.” The sense of failure was crushing, but somehow it was as though a priest had given us absolution, even perhaps his benediction. Go forth, my son and daughter, and find lives for yourselves. I went down to a little seaside town south of Boston and bought an old ramshackle house where I could get away from whatever the house in Brookline held for us. It was 1975. I was forty-five, Penny was forty-four, our children were eighteen, seventeen, fifteen, and fourteen. As we were packing up the house for our separate moves, she held up a mah-jongg set her mother had brought back from China and said with a shy and wistful little smile, “I suppose when we’re old we’ll end up playing mah-jongg together.” Whenever we met in later years, when finally we were civil and sensitive to one another, there was always that feeling of peering out across the wreckage of the crashed aircraft to see dimly that, yes, there was another survivor sitting there, dazed but still alive.

  The end of our marriage proved to be good for Penny. When she was fifty she met a handsome virile man of thirty-two who was so smitten with her that he could not leave her side, despite her insistence that he keep some distance, since once snared she would never again be entrapped in marriage. She was eventually the first woman to become an associate of a major Boston architectural firm; at her memorial service a young woman from that place described most fondly her mentoring of the junior females employed there. It was then I learned from another speaker of her strenuous efforts to promote female faculty at the aggressively and notoriously sexist Harvard University.

  SIX

  AND THEN I WAS GAY

  Detail of the fresco from the so-called Tomb of the Diver, Paestum, Italy, circa 470 B.C.E. A common motif of ancient Greek art was the symposium scene in which an older (bearded) male reclines next to a youth (beardless) on the banquet couch and engages him in flirtatious erotic banter. The Greeks of the classical period much valued the amatory relationship between men and boys in their late teens, which they considered to be a cornerstone of a cohesive society and the basis of a strong military posture. (Rita Willaert)

  Within a year Penny and I had divorced and sold the house. She moved with the girls to an apartment in Brookline and they continued to go to Brookline High School. The older boy, who had rejected college and gone to work in a restaurant, moved to Canada, where the children had once gone to a summer camp, and in a short time married the daughter of the owners, resuming a teenage crush on a serious basis. In a few years he had landed-immigrant status and had become a father. His brother followed in his footsteps in abandoning education and going into the restaurant business, but in his case the marvelous instinct for cooking led him through a chain of experience eventually into the kitchen of the Ritz-Carlton as a first step to a career as a chef. The girls went off with me to Athens for the school year 1978–79. I was delighted to have this one year with them when I could create a semblance of a family again. I liked there to be people around, having grown up in a house with ten or more wandering about. Apparently I had begun to experience the empty nest syndrome, unless that is nothing more than a journalist’s invention.

  After cooking meals and running a household for several years, I was alone, and I noticed it. With my share of the sale of the Brookline house, I contributed, as the court demanded, to a fund for my children’s education, and kept out enough to make a down payment on a two-family house in Cambridge. Penny and I had such a different attitude toward real estate. She was the heir to an ancestral farm of many hundreds of acres, but had spent her childhood living in rented rooms as her father moved the family from one Navy base to another. The war years sent her and her family into an exaggerated spin of dwellings, until finally she found root in a boarding school, and then in her dormitory room at Radcliffe, and finally in the apartment building where Mary and I lived on the top floor. When I met her she had never cooked a meal in her life. Domestic life, housekeeping, these were not skills she learned at home. When we divorced she lived in rented rooms for the rest of her life. I, on the other hand, who had grown up in a large and comfortable house, living at the same address until I was sixteen, yearned for that permanence again. I thought it would be the great house in Brookline, and well remember the day I left it forever with the real estate agent, who held my hand as I sat in her car sobbing.

  My return to Cambridge was inevitable. I was single. I was hungry for emotion and sex. I wanted males. I wanted the sophistication of Cambridge. But I also remembered a life there with Mary and with Penny, and my memory told me we were young and jolly. I wanted that back again. The two-family house I bought was traditional for the neighborhood, with one apartment upstairs and one below. My neighbors in the other two-family houses were all elderly Irish Catholic working people, who nodded but were not overly friendly. I did not present myself as gay, and when young men lived with me, local storekeepers would sometimes refer to them quite innocently as nephews. At other times the front bedroom in my new house was inhabited by various children at different stages of their growing up into adulthood, my second son before he joined a group of friends to rent out a giant apartment, my younger daughter when she needed a place to stay on vacation when she went off to college.

  I kept a low profile, and on one occasion was ingenious in protecting my image. An old acquaintance from graduate school days, more recently in my life when I was a visiting professor at Vassar, had suffered a stroke that left him slightly demented from the medication he was taking. I made the great mistake of telling him to drop by if ever he came to Cambridge, and weeks later he arrived to stay for a week, not at all what I’d had in mind. He was an enormously fat, chain-smoking alcoholic of incredible genius and with the hideous ill temper that often accompanies such gifts. He had recently decided that he was gay, and was making a great drama of coming out. This consisted largely in discovering gay Irish drinking songs, which, since he himself claimed Irish blood, was to be part of his new character. I did not allow smoking in my house, so he sat on my upstairs porch drinking and smoking most of the day while tossing the butts down to the sidewalk below. As he smoked and drank he bellowed out a tune off-key, the main refrain of which was repeated again and again: “I’m a-goin’ to suck your cock, my boy.” I kept hoping he was not audible from the street but discovered one day as I was sweeping up the butts that you could hear him loud and clear, and as I was making this discovery along came one of my formidable, stout old lady neighbors, who was looking up sternly in disbelief at the source of the sound on my balcony. I had the presence of mind to say quickly, “My friend, Father O’Neill, I had to remove him from his parish, poor old fellow,” shaking my head and lowering my eyes in sadness, to which my good neighbor replied passionately as she squeezed my arm, “Oh, Lord, Mr. Beye, you are a saint.”

  I discovered a new substitute for parenting when I volunteered at the Cambridge City Hospital as an aide in the noninfectious surgical recovery ward Friday through Monday, six a.m. to noon. Once I had satisfied myself that I was not taking a job away from someone who might be paid to do what I did, I was happy to go there, make myself useful, feel wanted, touch other human beings, feed them, bathe them, get my first experience of senility and decrepitude. It was a strange experience, drawing on the memories of early fatherhood twenty-odd years before, when I was washing, powdering, and diapering old ladies. With the demented and the silent you had somehow to intuit. I never got used to insisting upon food for the old lady with the flailing arms pushing the tray away. I still think she should have been allowed to starve herself, but people who knew better said she was not really sending a message. As my younger son said, “Dad, you’re the ward aide, not the doctor.” The experience has made me resolve to do myself in when the time comes that I am
failing.

  Most patients were severely decayed, except I was surprised at the number of young men in that ward who had been struck by cars while out jogging. Washing one of them was an interesting experience in male-male interaction. He was a relatively young Hispanic getting ready for a visit from his family. His arms and hands were useless to him, strapped as they were on an inflexible frame, so he had not been able to wash up at all. “I stink, I stink,” he kept saying as I was getting the tub of water and clothes and soap ready for his sponge bath, “wash me good.” He stood before me while I knelt with the washing materials and proceeded to scrub him. Of course, the smell was most profound around his genitals and anus. I had no problem cleaning him behind, and took a deep breath and proceeded to take his penis in my hand, pull back the foreskin, and carefully soap and wash him thoroughly there as well. I took my time, was careful, we kept a volume of conversation, and interestingly enough he did not allow himself to become even the least bit engorged in the process. It occurred to me that gay males who have such experience of the naked male body should undertake work of this kind, since they might be more neutral than other caregivers.

  As I started work in the Cambridge City Hospital I was winding down another volunteer career of ten or twelve years’ duration: teaching in the medium-security Norfolk State Prison. Boston University offered a degree in liberal arts there, of which I was the classics faculty. The program was limited to long-term inmates, since at the rate they could take courses it was going to be a while before they got their degree. One might wonder why an inmate student would enroll in a classical civilization or a classical literature course. First, because they had to take what was offered. Second, because taking a course was free, and it took a little time off an inmate’s sentence if he completed the semester. Third, it is very boring serving time in prison and something is better than nothing. Fourth, there were intelligent, intellectually curious men in Norfolk who had never had a chance for something like college courses. I found it sometimes frightening, often exhilarating, occasionally stupid and boring, and every so often quite sexy. I discovered that, contrary to my incredibly naïve liberal bias, many men are in prison because they are dangerous, violence-prone, and sometimes clearly psychopathic. Like the other teachers in the program, I declined the protection of a guard to which I was entitled, and never felt fear, even as I walked across the open courtyard big as a football field in which all the men were milling at the time of day I arrived for class. But one day was different when I walked into an empty room by mistake, only to see a man standing before me who advanced slowly and lethally like a leopard, speaking gibberish, and I was, as they say, scared shitless, until he, for whatever reason, stopped his forward movement and fell silent, and I walked out the door. Equally repulsive were the simpleminded and ignorant, who could talk for hours if they got going, and stopping them was difficult. But some guys could cut through my verbiage with quick intelligent questions or comments, often harsh, unyielding, and there were no compromises due to politeness. I had initially started volunteering at Norfolk because I was sick to death of the average Boston University student who appeared in my general education course. These guys were a real inspiration.

  The class read a lot of Homeric epic and the tragic dramas. Their take on these pieces was different primarily because almost all of them had killed someone, not a few in the Vietnam War, but others in domestic quarrels or botched robberies. We also had a couple of career killers, who were hardened to their work like anyone in a business, although murdering someone for whatever motive changes a person. The texts we read resonated in ways I had never known before. The men who came back from Vietnam to find their wives had been cheating on them, and beat them up badly, or cut them up, or sometimes killed them, read about Clytemnestra, who was sleeping with Aigisthus while Agamemnon was at Troy. Kill the bitch, was their take. Nothing about how she was exacting some kind of symbolic revenge for Agamemnon’s killing of Iphigenia. I had a student who had killed his wife and two baby daughters in a drug-induced madness and now was a gentle, utterly destroyed fellow living with that knowledge and memory. Medea meant something different to him than to other men. (I couldn’t bring myself to introduce Euripides’ play about Herakles and the madness sent him by Hera when he kills his children in a rampage.) Most of the men responded instantly to the weariness Achilles voices in the Iliad over the killing, the fundamental emptiness of life. It was not a middle-class conceit with them, something learned in literature classes, and I sometimes felt so inadequate.

  When I started teaching at Boston University, the students were what my mother used to call “diamonds in the rough,” that is, exceptional young men and women who were willing to take the risk, make the effort, try out something unknown to their parents called a college education. But over time the demographic became suburban kids of medium or meager talents. What is more nauseating than not overly bright youngsters whose entire lives have been lived between a fake colonial cottage, a 7-Eleven, and a shopping mall? Any prisoner would be more interesting and rewarding than that, I reasoned, and I was not wrong. I also said that the experience could sometimes be sexy, but not really. The men were not good-looking as they are in the films. Prison inmates are generally speaking losers, and losers are not as a rule good-looking, otherwise they would have conned themselves into a better life. The better-looking guys in my class were all the bottoms for the tough guys who protected them. After a while you could spot couples who would never appear so on the outside, because of course they wouldn’t be; physical relationships in a prison are imposed out of desperation. Of course, I maintained a professional aloofness that I assumed was a formidable armor against any identification, and was amused to meet one of the men on the outside when he had been paroled who said casually over coffee, “You know, we thought you’d want some cock off us in there, and there was plenty available for you.” So much for professional dignity!

  The divorce decree stipulated that I contribute most of my money to a fund for my children’s education, a demand of Penny’s despite my angry protestations that if they wished they could go to Boston University for free. Like most people in the education business, I have a much less sentimental view of the expensive institutions of higher learning, but Penny won that round. Still, I had enough to maintain the two-family house in Cambridge, an expense pretty much covered by the tenants who rented the downstairs. And I had my broken-down house near the seashore, which may have been shabby, but with two bathrooms, four bedrooms, and the other obvious spaces was big enough for wonderful parties as well as stay-over guests. Between these two dwellings, and, I would say, because of them, I experienced at age forty-five the first serious male romantic relationships I had ever had, other than that one Mediterranean trip with my student fourteen years earlier. One of them lasted a summer, one three years, one two years, and one turned into an on-and-off involvement for a decade. Three of the men were essentially heterosexual, although each in his own way tried out the various physical possibilities of male-male sexual partnership. The fourth was thoroughly gay, and wanted everyone to know it, once he himself had accepted his orientation. Where anyone might find fault with my love life was that at my age I was in love with men in their early twenties, the age of my sons, more or less. Others might think it limited, that so much of our pleasure derived from my fellating my partners and enjoying frottage thereafter on their naked bodies. But this is more often than not an instinctive homosexual behavior. For those who cannot grasp this, think of Léonide Massine, who was resolutely heterosexual and went on to marry, but started as the lover for many years of Sergei Diaghilev, the great ballet impresario. When he was once asked how it was that he could have sex with Diaghilev, he shrugged and said it was Diaghilev’s mouth and his penis, and that he had the warmest regard for the great man.

  The first of these four was a young married English fellow, who worked as a taxi driver, spent his time writing poems and novels, took a night course with me, and taught me more abou
t the Sumerian Gilgamesh poems than I had ever known, much to my shame, since I billed myself as an expert in ancient epic poetry. But, as he often points out, he learned what he knew about Homer’s poems in that course, and went on to use that knowledge professionally many, many years later. He lived with his wife and baby son as dorm parents in one of the local colleges. In springtime at the end of term we attended the same poetry reading. I was giving him a ride home afterward and on the way I must have fallen into one of my more sour moods, because as we pulled up in front of the dorm, he turned to me to say, “You must be happy. I don’t like to see you like this.” And with that he leaned across to kiss me on the mouth, slowly, gently, a kiss charged with emotion, or so I received it. He left the car with me in it, completely stunned. The next day I saw him across the way on campus, and when I saw how he averted his gaze when he saw me, I hastened to his side to say reassuringly, “Thank you for the kiss. It bucked me up, and you needn’t be the least bit embarrassed.” It was as neutral as I could manage, and he did indeed smile at me, as though all were to be completely forgotten, or understood as an aberration.